


The Liberty of Feeling

by volti



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Childhood Friends, Coffee Shops, College, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Feelings, Friends to Lovers, Personal Growth, Post-Break Up, Queerplatonic Relationships, Recovery, post-reveal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-28
Updated: 2019-09-27
Packaged: 2020-10-29 16:20:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20799497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/volti/pseuds/volti
Summary: Marinette and Nino are no strangers to things like hugs and hangouts and scraped knees. They've been dealing with that together since they were four.But breakups are new, different, scary. Almost as scary as trying to navigate what love actually is, or can be. Especially when they don't know how to name it with each other.Because if it's not a romantic thing, then whatisit?





	1. i.

**Author's Note:**

> this was... hard to write. not like emotionally harrowing, but like a genuine challenge. i think there are ways i can expand on it, but for now, this is it.

Sometimes Nino doesn’t need to ask Marinette permission to come over to her dorm. He just tells her he’s coming. And sometimes he doesn’t even need to tell her he’s coming. He just shows up at her door.

Honestly, she can’t expect anything less. It’s _Nino._

When Marinette does open the door, she’s doing everything in her power to make it look like she hasn’t just been crying—because, really, nobody needs to know that, or see it first thing. And nobody needs to know why she was crying at all. But Nino knows, even as he’s standing there, hardly looking at her out of his own shame and scuffing the hallway carpet with his heel. All things considered, there’s no way he doesn’t know. “Hey, ‘Nette,” he says. “Can I come in?”

At first, she can’t speak. Or, rather, it’s more like she can’t come up with the right words. Half of her wants to quietly close the door and isolate herself again, and half of her wants to ask him why he’s here when he should be somewhere else, and half of her wants to throw her arms around him and sob, and half of her knows that that’s four halves and twice the person she’s ever been or hoped to be. And as much as she wants to do all of these things, she ends up doing none of them, and instead numbly opens the door a touch wider to let him in. Just for a while, she tells herself. She can have him over for just a little while, and then she can let herself cry all over again and go searching for some ice cream.

Nino steps past her into her dorm room—which really could be cozier, if not for the mess of blankets and heap of used tissues on her nightstand—and she’s pretty sure he brushes against her on purpose. Not to push her, or to tease her, but to let her know that he’s really here. That someone else is. He toes off his sneakers in silence, which he insists on doing every time no matter what because this room is her home, and in a home you never, ever wear shoes. He sinks down onto her bed, flexes and folds his hands like he’s grasping for the right thing to say, and finally settles on, “I heard what happened. With you and Adrien, I mean.”

Marinette’s blood chills. It shouldn’t, because it really was only a matter of time before he actually came out and said so, but it does all the same. She closes the door behind her, leans against it for a long while. “Of course you did,” she says, wincing at how bitter she must sound to him. “You’re best friends. Why wouldn’t you know?”

“Well, yeah.” Nino sighs, deeply and through his nose. “But I’m your friend, too. And I was your friend first.”

When she looks up, he’s patting the empty space beside him on the bed, holding his arm out to beckon her over. Her body reacts before the rest of her does, and before she knows it she’s sitting next to him, leaning into his touch. Because she can’t _not_. She cares about him too much to push him away when he knows she needs him, even if she doesn’t want to admit it to either of them. He’s just as sturdy as always, but no matter how warm he is, no matter how often he squeezes her shoulder or rubs her arm, there’s too much quiet surrounding them. It takes everything in her, in all this silence, not to replay every last conversation, every little word. Everything she asked no matter how much she cried, no matter how much her voice cracked.

It takes everything in her, but the one thing that still sticks around is the sound of Adrien’s bedroom door slamming shut behind her. It twists her heart and makes her tense, makes her eyes burn with even more tears that she won’t let herself cry. Nino must feel it all too, because he only holds her more tightly, and settles for stroking her hair. “He was feeling pretty crappy when I saw him,” he says. “I figured you must’ve been feeling even worse.”

“I do,” Marinette says without thinking, stares unfocused at a spot on the floor. “I do feel worse.”

Nino doesn’t try to contest that. She’s almost glad for it.

“Is this how you felt, too?” she asks after a while. “When you and Alya broke up.”

Nino takes a deep breath and lets it out. There’s a smile in there somewhere, but if Marinette could guess, it’s probably a sad one. “I felt a lot of things when Alya and I broke up,” he says, “so you’re gonna have to be more specific.”

“I mean…” She shifts uncomfortably. “Did you feel weird being around me because Alya’s my best friend?”

He shakes his head; she only hopes he actually is pulling her closer, and that she’s not imagining it. “We had our reasons, and they didn’t have to do with you two. But, I mean.” This time he does hold onto her, and she isn’t just imagining it. “Ours wasn’t so… messy. You know?”

“Did you know?” The words are hard to get out around the lump that’s forming in her throat, but she knows she’ll keep being miserable and anxious if she doesn’t ask. “That he was going to break up with me? Because he knew, he even knew we weren’t going to get married. He said—that he and Kagami were—”

“No,” Nino says. “I didn’t.”

“How long?” She’s starting to shudder. Starting to say all of the same things she all but screamed at Adrien’s house. Except it’s all a broken whisper this time, and instead of hating him, she’s hating herself. “How long did he know? How long was he just—just stringing me along, when he knew… and his _dad—_”

Nino scoffs. “His dad’s an ass. We knew that.”

“I knew everything about him,” Marinette whispers, curling up into a ball. Anything to make herself small. Anything to feel a little more invisible. “I knew things no one else knows. Things Kagami can _never_ know about him. So why… why did he pick this? Why did he pick her?”

“Are you mad at her?”

“No,” Marinette says, and crumples into tears again. She can’t be mad. Or, at least, she knows she shouldn’t be. Even if there is a part of her that wants to. In the end, it isn’t Kagami’s fault.

In the end, she doesn’t really know who to blame. Nobody, everybody, comes to mind.

“Is it my fault?” she asks in a hoarse whisper. “Is it because I’m still in school? And because I don’t have a career yet, or a legacy, or prestige, or…”

“Well,” Nino says in a strangely matter-of-fact tone, “that’s just not cool to your parents to say something like that.”

He’s right. Her parents have every business and every right calling themselves the best bakery-patisserie in Paris.

“He said…” Marinette sniffles, rubs at her eyes with her sleeve and coughs pathetically into it. “He said his dad said they were the perfect match. But weren’t _we_?”

“What’d Adrien say?”

The words go sour before they even reach her mouth. Of course Adrien must have left this part out. “’Yes, _but_.’” She clenches her fists. “That’s all I needed to hear. I feel… I feel…” Her eyes screw shut, and she drops her face in her hands. “I’m feeling too much. And I’m feeling so _stupid_, like. I should’ve known, right? That I was wasting my time thinking that—that we really would be together forever? All this time I thought, maybe we could beat those odds, and… all this time, I wasn’t good enough.” She hiccups, and pushes the truth out again. “I was never going to be good enough.”

“’Nette,” Nino says, so gently it makes her feel like her heart is collapsing on itself. Makes her wonder if it really is the truth. “D’you think he would’ve been with you so long if he didn’t think so?”

It’s the fact that Adrien did—must have—that has her crying all over again and feeling so, so pathetic. Has Nino gathering her up into his arms so she’s seated comfortably in his lap with her ear pressed to his chest. If the beat of his heart doesn’t calm her down, then the buzz of his words start to.

“You talked to Luka at all about it?” he asks. “I know the two of you are kinda close.”

_Kinda_ is probably an underestimation, but Marinette humors him anyway. “I called him second. After Alya.”

“Harsh. Not even your parents, huh?”

“You don’t wanna know what happened with my dad when Chat Noir turned me down.”

“It couldn’t have been that bad.”

Marinette winces, remembering against her will. Nino must feel it, because he instantly apologizes under his breath. “He wanted to come over, too,” she mumbles, fingers curling tight into the front of his shirt. “‘Cause he heard me crying. He didn’t want me to be alone, but I wanted to be. I didn’t want him to see me like this. All gross and… gross.”

Underneath her weight, Nino laughs. “Dude. Luka easily makes top three on the list of guys who’ve seen the real you. I think he can afford to see you crying about a breakup.”

Well. Technically there’s only one guy on that list. And it’s the guy she just broke up with.

Not that she can tell Nino that. There are only so many people, even after Hawkmoth’s defeat, who can know about her and Chat Noir’s identities. There are only so many people who can know how she broke with relief when it was all over. How Adrien held her for hours and hours, nights and nights, and how she held him back. And how she can still feel it, even now.

She needs a damn drink. Forgetting for a while would be better than any of this. All of this.

“Uh uh,” Nino says as though he can read her mind. Honestly, he’s been around so long that he probably can. “You can have hot chocolate. Or tea. I’ll make you tea.”

Marinette sniffles again. “Like Mama Lahiffe makes it?”

Nino leans back a bit to smile at her. Within seconds, he’s reaching up to thumb the leftover tears from her cheeks. “Yeah,” he murmurs. “Just like she makes it.”

All she can do in response is turn to wrap her legs around him, rest her chin on his shoulder and keep him close. He laughs, under his breath, claps her on the back like he’s burping a baby or something. The tighter she holds onto him, the less he moves.

“Oh, _sa’eedi_,” he says and, probably without thinking, kisses the top of her head. Nothing too intimate, nothing too tender. Just something that tells her he’s still here. It has her heart splitting open and spilling all over again, has her crying into his sleeves. It doesn’t matter that he apologizes—or it does, but he doesn’t need to. It’s just that her heart is too full and tired of feeling at the same time, and her throat is too full of words that can’t get out. And she’s too busy crying fresh tears into his shirt and apologizing about _that_ to tell him it was okay, it’s okay for him to hold her, it’s okay if he wants to do this again. Just this.

Maybe, if she tries hard enough, holds tight enough, she can wring all the feeling out of her. So that way, when Nino tells her he misses her smile, she can actually oblige him.  
  


* * *

  
Nino works at a quaint little coffee shop downtown, a hole-in-the-wall type place where he doesn’t have to deal with corporate greed on top of customer service, and Marinette makes it a point to stop by once every so often. He needs to see his favorite patron, after all, and she needs her coffee made just right.

Honestly, it’s probably the only reason she drags herself out of bed a week and a half later, when she’s still not over the breakup—The End, she’s decided to call it for now. It feels like it, anyway. It’s hard for all of this _not_ to feel like The End, because something _is_ over. Something she invested time and love and all of herself in. She can’t ever remember being so miserable. She can’t remember ever missing one of Alya’s calls on purpose before now. Or four of them. Consecutively. She can’t ever remember leaving Luka on read and feeling bad about it. Or blocking a number that wasn’t Lila’s and feeling bad about that too. Or waking up with a throbbing headache and yanking her curtains shut because, in her expert opinion, the sun simply wasn’t allowed to exist yet. She wasn’t ready for it.

Marinette’s never actually gone drinking before—nothing besides a celebratory glass of wine when her Nonna is in town (“_Perché è la tradizione, cara mia!_”). But she had the distinct feeling, that morning, that it must feel like this afterward. With a little more vomit, probably. Or a lot more vomit.

But even now that she and the rest of Paris are actually able to feel things that aren’t unconditional happiness, enough becomes enough. She can’t let herself wallow in excess, no matter how much she wants to keep doing it, because art doesn’t get made that way. Careers don’t get made that way. And if no one else is going to hold her accountable, then she’s going to have to.

The only problem is, as soon as she walks into the café, she almost immediately wants to walk right back out, and run back to her dorm, and pretend she never left in the first place. Right there, waiting at the pickup bar and fitting two steaming cups into a disposable coffee tray, is Kagami. Prim and proper in a blazer and pencil skirt, just as expected, with her hair cut neatly and fluttering at her neck.

(Of course she has two drinks. Why should Marinette be surprised?)

The other problem is, as soon as Marinette gets enough feeling in her limbs to actually try and run away, Kagami meets her eyes across the shop. She’s rooted to the spot, so damn close to the door it’s killing her, and not even the easygoing music can do anything to comfort her. And then Kagami’s walking over, and Marinette’s willing herself to do literally anything, say literally anything—

“Good morning, Marinette,” Kagami says, cool and honeyed as always. She stops just short of Marinette, yanking her out of every impulse she can’t bring herself to act on. She’s cradling the tray in both hands and wearing an uncertain expression, and in the split-second that she looks away, Marinette hates herself for wanting to be so angry.

“Hey,” is all she says. Which is impressive, considering all the things she’s thinking. “How… are you?”

“I’m all right. I feel like I haven’t seen you in quite some time. Busy, I assume?”

Marinette bites her lip hard. “I guess you could say that.” She nods toward the tray. “Heading to class?”

Kagami gives a short nod of her own.

Marinette breathes. This is _killing_ her. “So… bringing a drink for a friend? That’s really kind of you. I’m glad you’re—” What? Glad Kagami’s making other friends? How cruel is that? “Never mind. I hope your classes are going okay, at least. I’ve heard business degree classes are pretty hard and formal and stuff.”

Leave it to her to fall back into rambling. She thought she left that behind when she was fourteen.

“Thank… you?” Kagami’s brows barely furrow, but her eyes sparkle just a touch. It’s kind of a weird combination, but maybe it just matches what Marinette said. “Listen, I…” She clears her throat, drops her voice, steps away from the door to let other people in. It’s considerate, and since Marinette is decidedly in the business of hating herself today, she’s kicking herself for not doing so earlier. “I just wanted to extend my condolences. About what happened between you and Adrien, I mean.”

Wow. Kagami really does pull no punches. “He didn’t die,” Marinette says, perhaps a bit too sourly, even if the end of that sentence is, _he’s just dead to me._

Kagami doesn’t wince—never has, in all the years Marinette’s known her—but she does sound put off, even stung, when she says, “Right.”

“Sorry, I—sorry.” Maybe if Marinette folds her arms more tightly, she’ll feel more protected, and she’ll feel less like she wants to scream. It doesn’t work. “I just haven’t had a lot of time to deal with it. It’s okay. You don’t have to apologize.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.” She has to say it’s okay. What kind of friend would she be if she didn’t? What kind of ex would she be if she just went off? She’d rather be able to keep coming back here, if she can help it.

There’s a beat of silence between them before Kagami gestures toward the tray. “I’ll be seeing him in class,” she says. “Would you like me to give him your regards?”

Marinette’s chest goes tighter than the knots in her shoelaces, and she hopes it doesn’t show. Almost as much as she hopes the ground will swallow her right then and there. She’s probably zero for two. “No, thank you,” she replies, and excuses herself to stand stiffly in line. She doesn’t look back to see whether Kagami’s still there, or let herself think about whether she should go back and apologize. She only waits her turn, until she gets to Nino at the register, and orders her usual drink with two extra shots.

Nino’s eyebrows shoot up just enough for her to notice it, but he’s still got that Customer Service Smile on, even for her. It’s practically his default when he’s on the clock. “You know I’m not gonna give you two extra shots, right?” he says, even as he punches the order in and scribbles it on the side of a plastic cup. He doesn’t even need to look at it as he writes. Marinette’s not sure if that’s a testament to how well he knows the order codes, or how often she orders white mocha with raspberry.

“I thought the customer was always right,” she mutters in between called-out names and the swipe of her bank card.

Nino’s smile goes sideways; it goes pretty well with the navy blue beanie she knitted him a few years back. “The customer is always right, except when the barista knows how buzzy she gets _without_ the suggested amount of caffeine.”

“Give me a break, would you?”

“That’s above my pay grade,” he says as he works on her drink. “But I _will_ be taking one soon, so this better be for here.”

Marinette musters the best smile she can. It’s uncharacteristically small, and it feels like she’s stifling herself. Like she isn’t really allowed to yet. Still, she makes sure Nino can see her taking up the armchair by the front window and pulling out her sketchbook. She’ll admit that part of it is a formality; she’s been stuck in a creative rut for weeks already, and The End hasn’t exactly made anything better. But part of it really is out of a hope that, if she stares at the pages long enough, or writes out enough notes, or even goes back to look at her old designs, something might spark.

She can’t tell if it’s the music or the morning chatter of customers or The End that’s getting to her, but the more she stares at the pages, the farther the ideas seem to be running away. They certainly aren’t trapped in all the extra thickness of her sketchbook; that’s all wear and tear and love. Even in this state, she’ll admit that. But wherever all those thoughts are, she can’t rein them in, or draw them out. And as the minutes pass, she finds herself huddling up more and more in her seat, trying to squeeze them out of her body somehow.

As it turns out, it doesn’t actually work. It only makes her knees sore.

She’s about to snap her book shut and call it quits when Nino sets a cup beside hers and draws up an extra chair. It’s so unintrusive, the way he comes upon her. Or maybe she’s just so used to it by now that there’s no way he could startle her. “You know something I was thinking about?” he says, stretching out his legs. “I don’t think I’ve seen you cry since we were four and you skinned your knees.”

Marinette hugs her knees and gives him a sideways look. “First of all, rude,” she teases back. It sounds a bit numb, but she doesn’t have to worry about him not understanding, and she’s sure it’s just the leftover instinct to not let herself be upset when other people are around. “Second, you’ve definitely seen me cry since then. Have you forgotten all the movies we’ve gone to?”

“I don’t mean _that_ kind of crying.” He takes a sip of his drink—mint green tea with extra sugar, predictable as always—and makes a face. Probably because it’s nothing like his mother’s. But he makes do anyway, grins and bears it as he blows the steam away. “I mean… well. You know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean.” Her sketchbook rests closed and idle on top of her bag—near enough on the off-chance that something came to mind, but resigned enough to tell her that she could take a day. Again.

For a while, they don’t say anything. Nino scrapes his chair closer against the worn wood floor, and Marinette glances back at the rows of coffee bags and the designs on the chalkboards by the register. It isn’t until he’s finished with his drink, turning his cup this way and that to watch the trickle of all the leftover sugar at the bottom, that he finally speaks up. “Hey. I just… wanted to say thanks.”

Marinette narrows her eyes, more confused than anything else. “For what?”

“For…” He shifts in his chair. “Letting me in, you know? You could’ve told me to go home. Or go away.”

“No, I couldn’t.”

“_You_ couldn’t have. But you _could_ have. You know what I mean?” Nino taps his temple over one of the buttons on his beanie; it’s got a drawing of a single noodle on it, along with the words, _penne for your thoughts?_ Marinette’s pretty sure he got it as a gag gift from Adrien. She wouldn’t put it past him.

She tries not to cringe. “I know what you mean.”

“I just… know you’ve been going through it. And I know you ran into Kagami, because she and Lila would be literally the only reason you would’ve wanted that much caffeine.”

“Lila doesn’t make me want caffeine,” Marinette says out of the corner of her mouth. “Lila makes me want alcohol.”

Nino rolls his eyes and flicks the side of her head. “Stop.”

That makes her smile again. She’s actually kind of happy it does. She scoots her chair a little closer, too, so the armrests bump against each other. “Honestly, I should be thanking you,” she murmurs. “I probably would’ve been a worse mess if you hadn’t been there.” There are probably only a few minutes left before he has to clock back in, give that politely cheeky smile to other people who aren’t her. She just wants these minutes to stretch. Maybe he’ll want them to, too, if she rests her head on his shoulder for a while. “You comforted me.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“You were there,” she tells his reflection in the window glass. That’s enough.”

When the timer on his apron beeps, Nino squeezes her shoulder and slips away to the counter. It’s when he’s well into an intricate coffee order that Marinette picks up her pencil again, and starts to sketch two outlines. A beanie, and a bracelet with a turtle shell design in the middle.


	2. ii.

What does it mean?

What does it mean when someone gives you solace in a way you’re used to, and not? What does it mean when you haven’t quite bounced back from something that feels so emotionally catastrophic, but there’s still someone you want to let in? And what does it mean when you haven’t quite figured out which door you want to open in the first place?

Marinette doesn’t know, and frankly, it scares her a little.

She hasn’t made much progress on those sketches from the coffee shop, but the more she thinks about it, the more she comes to the conclusion that they were just to get her hand moving. Just to capture whatever her mind could hold onto. Maybe she’ll come back to them later, or not, but in the end, it’s only one more thing to thank Nino for.

She hasn’t heard from Kagami, either, or Adrien. It doesn’t surprise her, exactly, but something deep inside her stings for realizing it. Was she really that easy to move on from? Had he moved on before he ever had that talk with her? How long had their relationship been… dead? And how long had she been trying to revive it?

In fact, she’s only heard from three other people besides Nino. Alya’s texted and called on multiple occasions, offered to take her out on the town to forget everything for a few hours or so. Even stopped by one night with bags of snacks and movie discs for an impromptu marathon. From how frequently she gets in touch, Marinette starts to get the sense that Alya’s using her own experience to her advantage. Or maybe she’s just trying to give what she wishes other people would have given her.

(Marinette can’t say she didn’t try her best back then. But, well, Marinette had never dealt with a breakup back then, either. And Alya was lucky that hers was so amicable. That much was obvious, even if she and Nino wouldn’t tell anyone anything beyond, “It just didn’t work out in the end.”)

Surprisingly, Chloe reached out to her, too. It wasn’t anything more that a couple of messages, of which Marinette distinctly remembers the words _Big Yikes._ But there’s a sense of camaraderie hiding in those words. It’s always sort of been there with Chloe, no matter how many times she’s tried to play it off in the past. It just decided to make itself more known when Chloe decided to do that thing called “growing up.”

And then there was Luka. He’s to be expected—almost as much as Alya, if not even more. Out of all the people to talk to her, he’s the only one who hasn’t apologized, or offer any condolences, and honestly she’s found it relieving. Instead, he’s asked her about her day first thing whenever he’s called. Asked about her classes, her design ideas, her parents and the bakery. He’s only made the vaguest references to The End, but only to say, “I’m glad to hear you’re getting out of the house, Marinette. It’s good that you’re trying to do something for yourself. Because you deserve it, you know? And it can be hard to bounce back after something like… when you’ve been committed to someone for so long.” There was a pause after he said it, one where Marinette thought too bitterly that, apparently, it wasn’t so hard for Adrien. Still, she’s sure she committed his audible smile to memory when he said, “You’re doing things for yourself. And you should be proud. Really, really proud.”

It’s weird, how Luka makes her feel proud of herself without ever having to say he’s proud of her. How he drapes a robe of confidence and dignity over her, and then stands back like he had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Nino, though—Nino’s been the constant. The text, the casual selfie, the shoulder, the _are you okay?_ even when Marinette wants to say, yes, yes, she’s okay. The only reason she doesn’t is because she’s not, not really, and she knows he’ll know it. It’s probably more that he’s trying to make sure she isn’t alone too often, or for long stretches of time. And maybe he’s doing all this for the same reasons Alya might be, or maybe it’s because he knows just what someone can get up to when they’re too alone and too upset. But even if she’s spending too much time thinking about all these whys, she still won’t say no to his company.

And she definitely won’t say no to the opportunity to cook with him. It’s how they talk best, and how they share themselves best; as far as she’s concerned, there’s no better way to share with someone than with food. And besides, his shakshuka is just that good. And she enjoys, maybe a little too much—the look he gets on his face when she makes a fresh batch of pan-fried potstickers.

The other great thing about cooking at Nino’s place is that there’s much more room in his kitchen, because he made the sound decision to stay home and commute to his classes for his mother’s sake—and maybe for Noël’s, too, even if neither of them wants to admit it. She even says hello to Noël first thing when she walks in. He’s fifteen or sixteen now, and he only looks up from casually mixing music on his tablet to glance her up and down. “You look like a mess,” he announces by way of greeting, and stretches out on the rectangular couch. So really, it’s nice to know he hasn’t changed much.

“Maybe if your mama had given me a raise…” she shoots back, hanging up her bag and flicking the top of his head on her way to the kitchen. “I’m _depressed_, Noël. It’s kind of what happens.”

Noël doesn’t look up from his tablet, but Marinette’s pretty sure he just mumbled, “Oh, mood,” under his breath. Even though, as far as she can recall, he’s never had a girlfriend. Or a boyfriend. And he’s never really indicated any interest in it, either. And he seems totally fine with that, so who is she to question it?

Nino, on the other hand, more than welcomes her into the kitchen, and makes it a point to hug her and sway with her long enough that Noël tells them to get a room. It’s hard to tell whether he does it just to spite his brother, or because he genuinely wants to hug her for that long, but she’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. He’s got a spread of ingredients behind him on the counter, including a package of green onions—she knew she forgot _something_, she always does—and he’s even set up a workspace for her beside him. “You know how it is,” he says sheepishly as she stares from one end of the counter to the other. “We make enough for six people in this house.”

“I think it’s nice,” Marinette reassures him. “It probably makes cooking easier for the next few days, huh. And isn’t your mom, like, one of seven?”

“Four brothers, two sisters,” Nino says. “_Lots_ of cousins.” And then, after a beat, “I guess it’s more of a just-in-case, thing. Y’know, just in case someone comes by.” He shrugs, washes his hands, rolls up his sleeves. “You never know the last time someone ate. Might as well do something good for them by resetting the clock.”

Marinette beams, takes up her space next to him, and tears into a package on wonton wrappers. This is the Nino she knows so well. The one who, under all that Cool Dude Barista Aesthetic, has a sweet goodness in his heart that she’s never quite seen replicated anywhere else. The one who cares if his friends and neighbors are fed. “What are you making?” she asks. It doesn’t take a genius to know there’s a smile still lingering in her voice. She doesn’t exactly care to hide it.

Nino would probably ruffle her hair if he weren’t so busy chopping celery. “_Harira_,” he says—the word rolls so naturally off his tongue—and nods toward a bowl of chickpeas soaking in water.

Her brow furrows. “Have you made that for me before?”

He nods. “The soup with the eggs and—shit, how do you call them again?” He sticks out the tip of his tongue between his teeth and points to it. “The bird tongue pasta.”

Marinette giggles in between mincing cloves of garlic. “It’s called _orzo_.”

“Look, you can’t fault me for forgetting. I basically speak three languages.”

“Moroccan Arabic isn’t its own language, Nino. It’s still Arabic.”

“It might as well be its own language! It’s like, trash-compacted Arabic that decided to have a baby with French.” He pretends to cock his arm and blast it like a shotgun. “That’s colonization, baby!”

Marinette doesn’t know what’s funnier: the wisecrack Nino’s smart enough to make, or the fact that he can take something so culturally devastating and jab all the right systems for it.

For a while, they work in relative silence. The only things to break it are the sounds of chopping, scrapes against the cutting board, the rapid-fire clink of a spoon or a fork against the edge of a bowl. The usual. The quiet togetherness that they’re used to. Then Marinette sets both hands down on the counter, inches from the first wonton wrapper, and she says, “Can I ask you something?”

“Yeah.” Nino turns to her, his voice going soft in record time. “Anything.”

“Why…” She chews her lip. Maybe she should keep her hands busy again. “I mean, I know it’s not really my business, so you can tell me to butt out and I’ll never bring it up again, but… why _did_ you and Alya break up?”

He doesn’t put anything down, but he does stop working, and he does let out a long, almost melancholy sigh through his nose. She’s starting to regret asking, but before she can take back her words, he shrugs and says, “I guess one of us owes you an explanation, huh. I just kinda figured it’d be her.”

This seems like the kind of thing Marinette needs to wash her hands for, sit down for but Nino doesn’t make any indication. In fact, she’s getting the feeling that doing so would make him more uncomfortable. So she continues to work, and he continues to talk. Everything he does with his hands now, he does with precise purpose; it’s amazing, how he can balance his attention so well. How long did it take him to master that? What did Master Fu teach him that she still has yet to learn?

“It’s not tragic or anything,” he admits, and the rest of his sentence must sound something like, _not like you._ She’s more than grateful he doesn’t say it. “It wasn’t like our relationship wasn’t strong. We just grew older. And because we got older, we kinda grew apart, too. And we wanted different things out of life. At least for now. Alya wants to travel and get the next big scoop and run the Ladyblog all at the same time. I wanna make sure my folks are doing okay, cause you just… you never know what kind of shit the law could pull on us next.”

Marinette winces. “Yeah. It sucks that I’m right.”

He laughs weakly. “It does suck that I’m right. But that’s not the point.” His shoulders slacken somewhere in between setting a deep pot to simmer and scrambling a couple of eggs with some cumin. Maybe keeping busy is helping him, too. “The point is, at least for now, it just couldn’t work anymore. We were… I guess… _too_ tied to each other? Do you know what I mean?”

Well. Given Marinette’s abysmally small dating record, of _course_ she knows what it means. She gives him a short nod; he doesn’t question it, doesn’t even flinch.

“I mean,” Nino says after a moment, still focused on his work, “we’re both still, like, civil with each other. I wouldn’t turn tail and run in the other direction if I saw her on the street. We just kinda need time. And space. Who knows? Maybe we’ll be close again one day. Maybe we’ll even start dating again, or… something.” He shrugs, soothes the soup as it starts to boil, and starts to let it simmer. “I just haven’t gotten to ‘one day’ yet. And neither has she.”

“Do you want to?”

Nino pauses, not too rigid, and takes a step back from the pot when it blows steam into his face. “I dunno,” he tells her with a weak, bittersweet smile, and sidles up to her station to work on some potstickers of his own. He’s not the best at making potstickers, but he sure as hell tries, and the fact that he tries is probably what makes them taste as good as they do in the end. He focuses far too much on filling them up, and resigns himself to identifying with them when they fall apart, and that’s the most amusing part of it all. Or it would be, if he didn’t say, “I guess it wouldn’t be the end of the world if we didn’t. But that first chunk of time, you get up to some sad, desperate things when you’re alone. Destructive things, you know?”

Marinette swallows thickly and pinches the dough a little too hard. “Yeah,” she mumbles. “I know.”

Dating the literal Hero of Destruction tends to help with knowing those things.

“I just…” He stops again, cradles the dumpling in cupped hands as he lays it beside all the ones she’s made. “I just don’t want you to have to deal with being alone. The lonely kind. If there’s anyone who doesn’t deserve that, it’s you, ‘Nette.”

Marinette bites her lip to hold back the lump in her throat andthe tears burning at the corners of her eyes. Two more pinches, and the last of the potstickers are done, and she reaches across the workspace to rest her hand on top of Nino’s, fit her fingers in the spaces between. Just for a moment. Just for a squeeze. “I don’t think you deserve it, either,” she murmurs, and doesn’t know why the words get stuck on their way out.

She slips away before he can so much as move to squeeze back, and as she’s rummaging through the cabinets for a pan and some oil, she swears she catches his hand flexing on the countertop. Remembering the feeling.

Just like hers.  
  


* * *

  
All Marinette remembers after that is that the food was delicious. And that potstickers don’t taste half-bad dipped in tomato stew.

He sends her home with a glass container of it, which she finishes off the next morning and which keeps her company through the few sketches she does manage. It’s still nothing substantial, but at least it’s better than a blank page. And at least part of her feels like she has something to show for all this time, and like she’s really earned it when Luka calls later and asks if she’s feeling up to hanging out.

She wouldn’t mind it, she tells him after a moment of thinking about it—which was less actually thinking about it and more delaying what would have been a too-quick response. She hasn’t seen him in a while, aside from video chats and the two-minute conversations they have when he stops by the bakery some mornings. He’s been giving her space, even though he’s not the one who needs to be giving it, and she adores that about him. The fact that he respects her so much, that is. Not the space.

In some ways, she wishes he’d close it. And in some ways, she’s kind of glad she isn’t.

She just wants to figure out why.

It’s funny, how the more Luka’s changed over all these years, the more he’s really stayed the same. He’s taken to undercuts and a few more piercings—including his tongue, which made her more than a little dizzy the first time she caught it glinting in the light. But his hair is still that same rich blue she’s known since she was fourteen, and he still knows how to pull songs from people’s hearts. He makes half a living off it now, from what she’s seen of him charming the streets, and it’s all the proof she needs to see that he never really needed to finish college. That his calling was right there all along, waiting for him to come back around to it at full force.

And he’s still every strain of gentle a person can be, from the way he picks her up at her dorm to the way he pays for her afternoon coffee, to the way he doesn’t even have to ask what she wants. He just knows. Small white mocha, one pump of raspberry.

(It’s not as sweet as it usually is, but she’ll blame it on the fact that Nino wasn’t the one to make it.)

“So,” Luka says, toeing the line between careful and casual as he settles next to her on a loveseat close to the back of the café. “How… have you been? I mean, how are you holding up? With school and stuff.”

The extra weight makes Marinette sink a little deeper into the seat, but Luka makes it a point to catch her with his arm around her shoulders so she doesn’t stumble. It gives her a good eyeful of the half-sleeve tattoo on his arm, a swirl of vibrant blue roses and musical notes. “School and stuff’s been okay,” she tells him with a faint smile, and she finds herself leaning into him on her own. It’s partly because he feels so comfortable, and partly because there’s a warmth about him that she doesn’t quite want to leave alone yet, and partly because he smells really, really good. Which she _could_ tell him, because knowing him, he _wouldn’t_ find it creepy, but she holds her tongue anyway.

“And…” Luka puts down his drink, an iced green concoction that she’s pretty sure is a matcha latte, but there are some things about him that are so unpredictable that she can never be sure. “What about the, uh, _other_ stuff?”

Oh. Of course. The _other_ stuff. Marinette has to put her cup down, because she knows she’ll fidget, and she knows she’ll spill. “I’m… holding up,” she admits.

Which isn’t a lie. It just doesn’t encapsulate all the crying nights and the stress sketches, all the moments she’s frozen up after smiling or laughing because being allowed to do either is still inconceivable. But maybe it doesn’t have to. Because it’s Luka. And with Luka, she hardly has to do anything to connect to him. And she’s still not sure if that’s just because that’s the kind of human he is, or because that’s the kind of people they are, together.

“I figured.” If the words weren’t musical, they wouldn’t be his. Gingerly, he places his cup beside hers and takes his time wrapping his arm around her shoulders. It’s slow, and unintrusive, and Marinette knows him well enough to know that he does it this way to tell her, with silence, that she can pull away at any moment. “I’m sorry,” he says—hums, more like—and she doesn’t pull away, and he holds her a touch closer. “You know it hurts to feel you so sad.”

“Sorry for being such an inconvenience,” she shoots back with a weak smile.

Luka goes red all the way up his neck. “I—sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“I know what you meant,” she murmurs, and rests her head on his shoulder without thinking. “I do. I was teasing, I’m sorry.”

“Take a drink every time we apologize, huh.” Luka laughs, more to himself than to her, and he starts rubbing circles into her shoulder with his thumb. He’s probably doing it on instinct, but it still makes Marinette’s stomach turn a little, and she’s sort of glad they’re so tucked away from the register and the other customers. And the front windows. She wouldn’t know what to do if one of the baristas looked their way, or if she just so happened to see Kagami in the window.

Or Adrien.

Or both of them.

“I…” It’s just the one word, but Luka snaps her away from her thoughts almost instantly, back to the pleasant, numbing feelings of his thumb. “I guess I can only sort of relate. I wish I could more, for your sake.”

Marinette pulls both legs up onto the loveseat. These days, making herself small has become a force of habit. The compression makes her feel something. Lets her comfort herself when—or because—other people aren’t always around to. “And for your sake,” she says, already sick at the thought of him feeling even a fraction of what she’s had to carry, “I’m glad you can’t.”

“Well, I… maybe from a length perspective, I can’t. I’ve never been in a relationship as long as you have.”

It shouldn’t sting, the realization that he must have moved on. Marinette hopes he can’t hear it, and tries to cover it up with a question. “How long was your longest?”

He has to think about it, even counts on his fingers. “A year and a… couple months?”

“Wow, that’s…” Admittedly, longer than she expected and somehow, at the same time, not long enough. But she’s not going to tell him that. “That’s a while.”

“It is a while. But I’ve committed to longer things.” Luka heaves a laugh that Marinette feels more than she hears or sees, and his fingers walk their way up to her hair to play with it absently. “I guess that’s the way I _can_ relate.”

It takes her a moment to read between the strings. “Luka,” she says cautiously, shifting to face him. “Is this about us?”

His hand’s slipped down to her shoulder because of the movement, and maybe they both think it’s better that way. It feels better that way. His eyes dart away to the register, and that’s all the answer she needs before his hands drop to his lap.

To say she’s at a loss for words is a bit of an understatement, but God, does she try anyway. Rubbing the back of her neck like they’re teenagers again and everything. “I… I didn’t know you still… Really?”

Well. She’s said worse.

“Yeah,” Luka says after a long, awkward sip. “Really. And I don’t—I don’t mean that to say I didn’t like any of the other people I dated. I did, genuinely, and I’m happy they were in my life in that way. I just… I guess I just…” He pauses to gather his words, fiddles with the thick band on his finger so much he almost drops it under the couch. “I just always come back to you, Marinette.”

Her eyes go wide, and she finds herself stammering to find the rights words of her own. He’s nothing if not genuine, and if she didn’t know that before, the way he’s looking at her—through his lashes, head inclined just so, teeth even sinking into his lip—would tell her everything. But she does know it, from all the times he’s told her she’s a song he wouldn’t mind writing, that she’s been stuck in his head since the day they met, and she’s always come out of those moments feeling fluttery and flattered and… and scared.

“That… now _that’s_ a while,” she ends up saying, because apparently The End and everything in Luka Couffaine’s heart are conspiring to sap whatever creativity she still has in her.

Luka laughs it off at first. Not in the way that tells her he’s just joking, or that he doesn’t take his own words seriously. Just the kind that tells her he’s not locking anything into place. Eventually he sobers up, staring at the coffee table long after he’s set the remains of his drink down and let the overhead music sink in. “Listen,” he says, so soft and so low that she has to scoot closer just to hear him properly. “I didn’t mean for that to come out again. And I’m not asking you to…” He shifts, heaves a deep breath, runs a hand through his hair even though it falls right back into place. “I just value you. Too much to be in the business of hiding things from you. And I’ve always thought you deserve to know there’s someone in the world who loves you. All the time, always. I’m not asking you to do anything with it, except know it.”

Marinette’s hands twitch with the urge to hold onto his. Not to say yes or no, but simply because it feels like the thing she wants to do in the moment. The _right_ thing to do. When they were younger—kids, really—he used to tell her all these beautiful things about herself, even when he swore up and down that he was no good with words and only good with sounds. He used to tell her about how she always was his favorite song. How easy it was for him to find where the music was hiding when all he had to do was think of her smile. How he had dreams about her, sometimes, and he only knew it because he would wake up smiling after. And how, if a day ever came when she wanted to give him a try—no matter when it did—she could trust him not to say no.

But… is today really that day? So soon?

And if it is, then why is she having so much trouble saying so? How come the only thing she can do is just… _look_ at him, when there’s such a powerful part of her that wants nothing more than to cling to him and everything he feels, and to mirror it right back? Why can’t she do anything? Why can’t she say anything?

“Marinette?” Luka says. He sounds uncertain, like he wants to reach out to her again but can’t. And it’s there, in some mundane coffee-shop moment that feels nothing like a movie, that she realizes what Nino meant at the kitchen counter. And that she hasn’t gotten to ‘one day’ yet, either.

It’s a twisted sort of thing, how she spent so much time agonizing that no one would ever love her like this. And how she starts to think that now it’s the other way around.

“I’m not ready,” she says, with her head in her hands, an entire public embarrassment even where so few people can see. “And I know—I know you wouldn’t hurt me like that. I trust you so much, more than you know, and I want—_something._ But I… I’m not ready to do it again, Luka, I’m not, and I’m sorry, I really am—”

“Hey,” he murmurs, gathering her up in a hug that’s just the right tightness, just enough to make her forget most things. “That’s not something you ever have to apologize for.”

“But what if I’m just leading you on? And making you hope and wait and all that, I’d be no better than—”

“You’re not doing any of that,” he reassures her just as she’s starting to choke on her words again. “I know a lot of those feelings. And I know that being your friend is enough. Being in your life is enough.”

Marinette swallows hard, tries to get the growing fuzzy feeling out of her head. It doesn’t work. “What feelings do you mean?”

“You know I can’t say this stuff with words.”

“Try,” she says, and settles back like she’s getting ready for a story. “Try anyway.”

Luka follows her lead, clenching and unclenching his fists in turns like he wishes he’d brought his guitar with him. It takes a while for him to speak. “Just… the feeling of wanting love, and wanting to be loved. Not knowing how, or who, or anything like that but still knowing that you want it so badly. And the feeling that… something’s missing, something that hasn’t been missing for a long time, and you want nothing more than to fill it, but…” He sighs; it’s not the most she’s ever heard him say in one go, but the words are so serious that it feels that way. “But it doesn’t matter who. You just want the hole to be gone so you don’t have to feel it anymore.”

It isn’t until he says that that Marinette actually starts to feel the hole open up and crush her at the same time. And it isn’t until he stops talking that she realizes he’s right. That she can grasp at the knowledge and the feeling, but she can’t quite pin it down the way it needs to be. The way she wants it to be.

“I love you, Marinette,” Luka says—the first time he’s come out and said it so explicitly, even if he says it too fast—and his fingers brush cold and callused and oh-so-gentle against her knuckles. “Deeply, and in ways I don’t even know how to really describe. But I don’t think either of us is in the business of filling those holes. I don’t think we’re meant to do that for each other.”

It’s exactly what she’s thinking, exactly what she’s known, but it still punches her in the gut anyway. Because it’s not ‘one day’ yet after all.

“Fill your hole,” he murmurs, pulling her close again, his fingers winding their way into her hair. “And I’ll fill mine. We can look for other kinds of happiness, and other kinds of love, and when we’re ready…” He tucks her head under his chin, and the tightening of his jaw tells her he’s smiling, the tender kind she’s so used to seeing in him. “When we’re ready, we’ll come back and find this just the way we left it. And we can thank the feelings we had, and we can let them go and find new ones. Ours.”

Marinette likes the sound of that so much—likes every little thing he put into every little word—that she can’t help tearing up. “Just the way we left it,” she whispers, like an _I love you too_, and when Luka frees his hand she reaches up to catch it and give it a squeeze.

Luka sinks into the couch and takes her with him, squeezing her hand back. “Just the way we left it,” he repeats. He looks like he wants to kiss her somewhere, when she dares to meet his eyes, but he only shakes his head and holds her gaze.

Marinette read in some book that the best kisses are exchanged a thousand times with the eyes before the lips ever touch, and at this rate, and after all this time, they’ve still got a few hundred left.


	3. iii.

“Hold on, let me get this straight. He confessed to you?”

“Yeah…”

“_And_ he turned you down? Like at the same time?”

“I… guess? When you put it like that?”

Nino flops back against her desk chair. “What in the hell.”

It’s more complicated than that, Marinette wants to tell him—because, to be fair, it is. But she barely has the capacity to explain it to herself, let alone to someone else. The most she’s made of it, which is satisfying enough to her, is that at the end of the day, she and Luka still care about each other. That they love each other without putting on the pressure of waiting, even though that’s exactly what they’re doing. And that he understands her so well that it weirdly hurts.

And, maybe, that it’s okay to start leaving Adrien behind. Just to start.

Instead, she shakes her head and scoots back to make room for Nino on her bed. “My brain hurts trying to make sense of it all,” she says with a weak laugh.

“_My_ brain hurts trying to make sense of it, and it’s not even my thing to make sense of,” he shoots back, and takes her invitation with a murmur of her nickname. It isn’t entirely awkward for the two of them to fall into casual affection like this, even when they’re not making efforts to comfort each other. It’s not like they’re sitting with unresolved feelings, the discomforts of a skinny love. And it’s not like they’re trying to make something out of a moment better left dead. They know each other, they’re used to each other—the food-sharing, the cuddling, linked fingers and kisses to the top of the head and whispers of _You okay?_ If there’s anything there, she’s never really thought to question it because… well, because it’s Nino. And maybe there is something there. But it’s not romance, she knows that for sure. In spite of all these feelings, in spite of the fact that she could say she loves him, that she could pull off some unorthodox happily-ever-after with him, it’s never been romance with Nino. 

It’s… different. It just is.

Which is partly a relief, and partly confusing. Because if it’s not romance, then what is it?

“Hey,” she says to break the silence. It isn’t until that moment that she realizes she’s practically welded to his body with how close they are. And that he’s been rubbing comfortable circles into her shoulder with his thumb. “Can I ask you something?”

“You just did,” Nino says, the grin all too audible in his voice, and then, “Shoot.”

She shifts in his arms, lips scrunched up in thought as she tosses a glance out the window behind her. It’s quiet in Paris, which is kind of unusual for this time of the evening, but she’ll take the peace. She’s been looking for it for a long time, and as far as she’s concerned, she still has yet to find it. “How come you call me that?”

Nino’s brow knits in the middle. “Call you what?”

“_Sa…_ I dunno how to say it right, but like. The happiness thing. That’s what it means, right?”

“_Sa’eedi?_” he prompts—it just sounds _right_ coming from him—and she finds herself nodding frantically. “It’s not just a happiness thing.” This time, he makes his smile a little more obvious, and he flicks the tip of her nose. The way she scowls doesn’t deter him. “It’s _my_ happiness. That’s what it means.”

“Well, why do you call me that? Didn’t you tell me once that pet names in Arabic are like, super intimate or something?”

“Yeah,” Nino says quietly. “They are. But I mean, maybe it just feels that way ‘cause stuff that like—y’know, in your native language—just… holds more weight, I guess? But hey, besides. As far as pet names go, that’s one of the tamer ones. I _could_ call you something else.” He starts ticking a few of them on his fingers, translating them as he goes. “_Habibi_—my love.”

Instantly, Marinette wrinkles her nose. “Doesn’t your mom call Noël that?”

“Everybody calls everybody that. It’s standard.” He shrugs. “_Roohi,_ my soul. _’Ayni_, my eyes. _Qamar_, the moon. _Sa’eedi…_” He grins, reaches down to tickle her waist, and she can’t help giggling and squirming in his grasp. “That’s why I call you that. ‘Cause you make me happy, ‘Nette. And honestly, it’d feel kinda weird if I _didn’t_ have a nickname like that for you.”

It takes her a moment to settle down again, nestled into his side, and gradually, her legs tangle with his, and their fingers wind together. Her heart starts to pound, just a touch faster than usual, but it’s not that heavy-hitting, mind-numbing thud that used to happen around Adrien. And it’s not the _we could be something_ sort of flutter that flares up every so often around Luka. It invites her to stay a while longer, to bask in the feeling because it’s hers to have. “What was that for?” she finally asks.

Another shrug, and Nino tucks her head under his chin. “You haven’t laughed like that in a while. I missed it.”

He’s… not wrong, now that Marinette thinks about it. “Nino?”

“Yeah?”

“What…” She winces before she’s even asked. “What’d you use to call Alya?”

If the question makes Nino uncomfortable, he certainly doesn’t show it, except perhaps in the pause that follows. He only slumps back against the wall, taking her with him, and squeezes her shoulder in pulses. Like he’s beating off some feeling with a stick every time it tries to rise up. She’d try to find a pattern in it if she weren’t so worried about him. If she weren’t so focused on trying to take back her question. “_Hayaati_,” he murmurs. “I used to call her _hayaati._ Took me months before I could do it without getting all… flustered, y’know?”

She supposes nodding would be the sensible thing to do. “What… does it mean?”

He laughs to himself; it almost sounds sad. “’My life.’ Kinda silly to call someone that when you started dating at fourteen.”

“I don’t think so. Not when that’s all you know.” Nino’s fingers are starting to twitch, and she grabs hold of them fluidly, passing her thumb over his knuckles over and over. “I don’t think it’s silly to love someone. That much, or at all, ever. Besides…” This time, she’s the one to smile, even if he can’t see it. “The two of you held out for a long, long time. It was beautiful. Really, really beautiful.” Her chest goes tight toward the tail-end of her words, and she has to press her tongue hard against the roof of her mouth and screw her eyes shut against the possibility that, maybe, hers never was.

“Maybe,” Nino mumbles, as though he’s thinking the same thing about himself. “But I don’t think I’ll ever call someone that again.”

“How does that feel?” Marinette’s not sure if it’s the right thing to ask, but it’s the only thing she can think of asking. And she thinks she might be the only person who can.

He’s quiet for a long time before he finally says, “I don’t know.” No elaboration. Nothing frustrating about it. It comes out soft, borderline numb. Like he never wants to be asked again. Like he never wants to know. He changes the subject now, barely and just a bit too fast. “What about you? Did you ever call Adrien anything?”

Marinette freezes in thought. Not because she’s remembering any particular name, but because almost nothing comes to mind. When she and Adrien first started dating, she tried most every pet name in the book. _Baby, sweetheart, darling._ If someone could name it, she already tested it. But nothing ever seemed to fit. And maybe that should have been a sign to her way back when. But then, she was never very good at getting out of her own head.

She shakes it now, and leans on Nino as much as she can. “Everything and nothing, I guess. Just his name.” Adrien. _Adrien._ She could have said it all day. Now she only thinks it some nights, like a reel of ticker tape that just won’t cut. “That was enough.”

Nino hums in response. It doesn’t sound quite so removed as Adrien’s whenever they talked about mundane things, and it’s not nearly so musical as Luka’s whenever he needs her to know he’s hanging onto her every word—even if that’s probably all the time. But it’s his, and it’s unique, and that’s what matters about him. About them. “That’d explain why you never call me anything else, either.” He laughs to himself. “I guess I never thought it’d be enough.”

“Names are enough,” Marinette murmurs. “It’s yours. And you’re enough. So of course it is.”

He doesn’t speak for a while, only flexes and relaxes his calves, over and over, as if trying to get his body to absorb the words. In the end, he’s the one to break the silence, too. “Say it again,” he says.

“What? That you’re enough?”

“My name.”

Marinette’s stomach jolts for a particular reason she can’t get herself to name. “Nino?”

It’s not exactly a magic spell or anything, and yet as soon as she says it, something in the room feels… different. Softer. Pink—which feels like something her heart understands but her head doesn’t, like most poetic things. She touches her lips, brows knit together in the middle as she mouths his name one more time against her fingers. _Nino._

Same shift in the room. Same element she can’t name. But from the look and feel of it, Nino’s affected, too. His whole body seems to relax against hers, and when she looks up at him, he’s smiling, wide and dopey. It reminds her of how she feels when she sinks into a hot, fragrant bath after a long day—after all the long days she’s had to put herself through lately. Relieved, like things are meant to be this way without a grasp for explanation.

“Yeah,” he says after a moment, his fingers dragging comfort up and down her arm. “Just stick with the name.” He doesn’t look like he’s in love, not quite. But there’s something approximating it in his expression. Something familiar, something intimate. 

Something, she’s starting to think, that she wouldn’t mind seeing more often. And something, she’s starting to think even more, that she wouldn’t mind being responsible for.

* * *

It only works with Nino’s name. And it’s not because he tried to say hers.

It’s because Adrien did. Because he had the audacity to shift from foot to foot and ask, “How have you been?”

How has she _been_? Is he _serious_?

Honestly, she should have known better than to think she’d never run into him again. Even when it has been… what? Weeks? Maybe even a couple of months since The End? Long enough that she can feel herself starting to get over it, and short enough that she’s still referring to it as The End, with all its chills and pits in her stomach. She should have known a moment like this wou;d be inevitable. There was just a part of her that was hoping it wouldn’t happen at all. Or at least, not so soon.

In the moment, she wishes she had something to do with her hands. Even if she places them behind her back, Adrien will know she’s wringing them, fidgeting somehow; he knows her that well. You don’t _not_ know someone that well when you’ve been so intimate with them for so long. She envies him for the bag that’s swinging so idly from his fingers, and for the way he takes his time with his words, even if they come out achingly slow. But the more this moment drags out, the more she can feel herself falling into herself, like the walls are closing in on her and it’s up to her to make herself small, make everything right so she can stop suffocating.

That, or scream loud enough to shatter them altogether. Because he left her. He led her. He lied to her.

It didn’t matter that she walked out first. He left her. _He_ left her—

“I don’t know what you want from me,” she finally blurts out. If he was in the middle of a sentence, she barely registered it. She just had to get the words out, because they were bubbling up so much inside her that she probably could have vomited them. “Don’t you have what you want? Isn’t that what matters to you?”

If the words sting him, then either Adrien doesn’t make it obvious, or she doesn’t care enough to notice. Why should she? A pinprick barely holds a candle to all the times she’s torn herself apart over him. All the times she’s had to feel everything he did to her all over again, had to think about how hard she tried to make their relationship work and how it must have been all for naught. All the times she’s told herself, over and over, that she’s done with these kinds of relationships, done with men hurting her, done with never knowing what she means to someone who means the world to her.

“Marinette—” he begins, but it’s all she’ll allow him to say.

“I’m trying,” she says, one hand held up and shaking. She hates that it is. Hates that her voice is, too. “I’m trying with everything I have to get over this.”

Adrien blinks a couple of times and goes the wrong sort of soft around the edges. It’s not a kind she’s used to. but she’s never been used to being so sharp with him, either. “I… guess that answers my question.”

“Which question?”

His brows knit in the middle; it must be what she interrupted, or tuned out. “I asked if there were still any hard feelings between us, because I…” He pauses to take a deep breath, fingers curling tight around the coffee tray he’s holding. Marinette doesn’t need to guess who the other cup is for. “I still think you’re a good person, Marinette. You’re a wonderful woman, and I—I shouldn’t have done what I did—I shouldn’t have waited as long as I did to tell you—”

“I’m glad you recognize that,” she says, folding her arms tight because it’s the only way she can hold herself together. “And I think you know the answer to your own question already.”

Adrien stares. It drives her nuts in a way it never used to.

“Of course there are hard feelings, Adrien.” Her voice wobbles on his name, and she tries not to wince. “This isn’t the sort of thing you say sorry about and think everyone else will feel better weeks later. You don’t do to someone what—what you did to _me_—and expect, or hope, that there aren’t any _hard feelings_. Have you even thought about how Kagami might be feeling? That maybe you’re only with her because it’s just what your parents want? What happened to your spine? What happened to you?”

It’s getting so, so hard to contain every awful thing she feels, every awful thing Adrien ever made her feel, but she has to. She has to keep composure. She has to square her jaw. Even now, when the hurt clouds her brain and feels like acid in the marrow of her bones. Even when the hurt sparks in his eyes, too, twists her heart and makes her want to apologize for every cruel thing she might have said.

The fact that he doesn’t have anything to say—the fact that he’s just _staring_ at her, dumbfounded—is indication enough that she doesn’t have to.

Marinette takes a deep breath. Screws her eyes shut. Lets them drift open again. Admittedly, there’s a part of her that thinks he might disappear soon enough, but most of her is glad he doesn’t. It’d be a waste of words and thought otherwise. “Look,” she finally says, wishing to God she had pockets to jam her hands into. The strap of her bag will have to suffice. “Maybe this really was for the best. Maybe we really should have ended things, because… in the end, I can’t be with someone who isn’t honest with me, or who can’t commit to me, or…” She shakes her head, tries again. She’s getting somewhere, at least. Farther than she anticipated. “I loved someone a long time ago, I think. But that someone wasn’t you. Not who you are now.”

Adrien opens his mouth to say something, shuts it again, like a fish. Eventually he says, “I… Marinette, I just need you to know I—”

“I don’t want to know it. I don’t. I have to go. I think you should, too.” She grits her teeth, starts to walk. “If you’re going to do right by somebody,” she says as she passes him, “if you couldn’t do right by me, at least do right by her. And at least have the decency to tell her if you can’t.”

She tries to carry herself with dignity, and succeeds by the skin of her teeth. She doesn’t even bother to look back to see if she affected him at all, no matter how much she wants to.

She gets as far as turning the corner before she breaks into a speedwalk, dips into the nearest alleyway, and cries. Sobs, shaking, with her head in her hands, collapsing against the wall. It feels manic, hysterical, like her brain is skyrocketing into some other realm of existence; she can’t remember ever crying this hard before, but she can. She can feel everything. She’s _allowed_ to feel everything, and she does feel everything, and everything feels so, so horrible when you’re alone and it hits you all at once.

She can feel herself sinking into all those questions again. What did she do wrong? What didn’t she do enough of? Why wasn’t she enough? Why did he leave her? Why did he go back all those years? Why did she ever think they could last? Why isn’t anything working anymore?

Why, why, _why_?

She doesn’t know how long she cries there. Only that it’s long enough to give her a headache and make her eyes puff up and sting, and that she hasn’t quite found herself again when a pair of arms wraps all too carefully around her.

“It’s okay, ‘Nette,” a voice murmurs, soft and grainy and so recognizable. “I gotcha. You’re okay.”

Nino.

Of course.

Marinette doesn’t even know what she’s babbling anymore—something about _I tried, I tried so hard, I tried everything_. And Nino doesn’t ask what she’s talking about, either because he doesn’t want to know or because he doesn’t need to. He holds her through it, the way it seems like he holds her through everything. He doesn’t carry her home, even though he could and even though she sort of wants him to. But he stays with her the whole walk over, keeps her steady with his arm around her shoulders, and makes sure she’s safe and sound. And she’s the one who grabs for his wrist when he says he’s going to head home.

She doesn’t even realize she’s done it. She only feels his pulse pounding under her fingertips, and the tremble in her limbs, and the way her voice breaks when she says, “Don’t go, Nino, please. I don’t want to be alone. You make me feel less alone.”

She’s never said so in so many words, but it’s not as though she hasn’t felt that way all along.

Nino pauses, studies the cracks in her expression and how she twitches with every need to keep him near. Then he goes soft around the edges, fills in all those fissures. “Okay,” he says, kicking off his shoes and sliding onto her bed. “Okay. I’ll stay.”

Marinette doesn’t know how long he stays, only that he pulls her into his lap after that and rocks her while she cries. Only that he holds her so tightly that she almost forgets what any other feeling is. That his hand feels perfect rubbing those wide circles into her back, and that he kisses her forehead like his lips have always belonged there. Maybe they _have_ always belonged there.

“Nino,” she hiccups, rubbing her eyes with her sleeve. They still sting, still feel puffy, and she can’t bear to get up and look at herself in the mirror. She’s afraid of what she might see—splotches and running mascara, maybe—and Nino is too comfortable besides.

“Yeah,” he says, and pulls her closer. “I’m here.”

“I love you.” She barely recognizes herself as she says it, and the words come out so fast that she might as well have spit them out. But words like that deserve more dignity. And the more time passes, the less she wants to take them back or regret them.

Even still, she’s sure she can feel him pause and tense up under her—as he probably should. When was the last time someone outside of his family told him that? When was the last time he believed it? And when was that for her? It takes him a moment to relax again, return to rubbing her back and rocking her, and he adjusts her so she can nestle her face in the crook of his neck. Cloves and coffee, the way he usually smells, has for years. Funny, how it melts her so quickly, makes her hug him back so tight.

“Love you too, _sa’eedi_,” he murmurs into her hair. “I love you, too.”


	4. iv.

That’s the weird, crazy, hilarious thing about saying _I love you._ It’s one of those magical phrases that you sometimes tell everyone because your heart is so full of it, and that sometimes you reserve only for the most special people. Because your heart may be full, sure, but sometimes that fullness is on reserve.

Nino’s always been a reservation. She’s known it for years.

Marinette thinks a lot about that night. The crying, the rocking, the fact that she literally fell asleep on him for a good half-hour and he didn’t say a thing about it. She might even be overthinking it, honestly, but that’s just who she is. A natural over-thinker.

But why wouldn’t she overthink this? What if something’s fundamentally changed between her and Nino? What if they don’t see each other the same way anymore? What if—what if he thinks she’s using him as some kind of rebound? And what if he told Adrien about it?

Maybe she should trust him better than that, but at the same time, she wouldn’t put it past him. She only said she loved him. She didn’t say how.

She’s not even sure _she_ knows how.

So for the next couple of weeks, she finds herself fluttering around the coffee shop. Sure, it’s still a choice place to do some people watching and get ideas for designs, or for a change of scenery when she’s been sitting in front of the sewing machine for too long. And sure, it’s still a place that grounds her in… most ways. But lately, for no reason, her heart starts pounding between her ears if Nino’s at the register or the bar, starts dancing to whatever beat he’s drumming on the countertop. And she’s smiling stupidly wide whenever he hands off her drink or sidles up next to her on his break. And she keeps glancing up from her work every so often, searching for his face behind the espresso machine and dropping her gaze as soon as it meets his.

It’s… unsettling? Scary? Definitely scary.

Because it’s _Nino_. Who said she was supposed to feel—_anything_ like this—around _Nino_? Aren’t they friends? Good friends, sure, but only friends?

No, there’s—there’s definitely something else there. She thinks.

But what is it?

And why doesn’t it feel as new as she’s expecting?

“You okay?”

Nino’s voice startles her, even though it probably shouldn’t; he always comes to see her on his break, no matter how short. “Yeah,” she says, a little too clipped. “Totally fine.”

She doesn’t have to look up to know he can see right through her, but he doesn’t say anything about it. He only gets so long for these breaks, after all.

Still, her phone buzzes with a call from him hours later, when she’s already back in the dorms and working through the dregs of her block. It’s started to clear up—funny enough, ever since she ran into Adrien—so at least she can add idle, sweeping strokes to her pages as she takes the call.

“Hey.” Nino sounds tired, which isn’t really unusual after hours around steam and coffee grounds and the same old lazy music. “Just wanted to see how you’re holding up over there. You’ve been kind of… I dunno the word for it.” There’s something about the way he says it that makes her think he wouldn’t know it in Arabic, either.

“I…” If Marinette could huddle up further in her desk chair, she would. “I guess I feel… something’s been… different.”

“Different?”

“Well, yeah. You don’t think anything’s changed? You know, between us?”

Silence crackles through the phone. Then Nino says, with an uncertain pause, “Well… no. Why do you think that?”

This time it’s Marinette’s turn to stop, to hope she isn’t making anything weird. Or weirder than it already is. “I,” she says, haltingly. “I was just thinking about the, um. The… my slip-up? You know?” She’s not sure her voice could get any smaller, but a portion of her wishes it would. “I mean, no, not that I think about it as a _slip-up_. I just—I mean—”

“I get what you mean,” Nino says, even though he sounds a bit hurt. Maybe she shouldn’t blame him for that. Wouldn’t anyone feel that way? “I guess I don’t see anything wrong with you telling me you love me, ‘cause… well… don’t you?”

“Of course.” Something twists her gut and her heart at the same time, wrings the words out of her before she can properly think them through no matter how true they are. “I do, yeah, it’s just… different.”

“Different how?”

“It’s—” Whatever that twisting thing was, it makes its way up to her throat and wedges itself there, keeps anything else fro getting out. She has to clear her throats and her thoughts just to get it out of the way. Even then, the words come out all jerky, like she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Or like she does, but she’s too afraid to say it. “It’s not like what I ever felt for Adrien.” She winces at the name, stumbles over it the way she falls into bed as she tries to spit it out and be done with it. “And I guess it’s not even like how I feel for Luka. Whatver that is. Because I guess that’s similar, but I need to be… away from that. Very, very far away.”

“I get that,” Nino says after a pause. Marinette can’t tell what it contained.

She swallows hard. “I do love you, Nino,” she tells him again, even though her voice cracks in the process. But it’s the good way this time. The truthful way, the kind she’d let happen a few hundred times. “I mean it. I love you the way I love anyone who’s been in my life the way you have, as long as you have. But even then, it’s—I…”

Marinette ends up trailing off, feeling kind of pathetic for it. It’s only worse because she can’t see his expression; for all she knows, he’s probably staring into his mirror with an incredulous expression. For all she knows, he’s inches from hanging up, and she’ll have to pick up everything she spilled piece by piece, all on her own. Even though she’s done it before. Even though she’s had no choice but to do it.

But that pause passes, because everything does pass, no matter how long you dwell in it. And then Nino asks, after some fumbling on his end, “Well… if you love me, and I love you too, then what does the other stuff matter?”

Marinette’s heart freezes. It sounds… eerily, unsettlingly, like Adrien’s old, occasional insistence that they didn’t need to have a label. It’s only taken her this long to realize why he did. “I—I don’t know what you mean, but I really hope it’s not what I’m thinking—”

“I mean,” Nino says, “do you have to force a name on it right this instant? Or do you just wanna love me until we figure it all out?”

“I…” This time, her insides stop freezing and start turning instead. “The second one.”

She can almost hear his smile through the phone. “You just wanna love me?”

Hearing him say it makes her whole body curl up on instinct. There’s nothing to protect herself against; maybe it’s an attempt to keep everything she feels as contained as possible. “Yeah,” she says, a murmur into the receiver. “It’s not hard when I already do it.”

“’Nette?”

“Yeah?”

“Can I come over?”

There go her insides again. “Yeah.”

* * *

“Hi.”

“Hey.”

Marinette can’t tell if Nino looks like the twenty-something he is with the way he so casually leans on her doorway, or if he’s more like a teenager on his first date with such a dopey smile on his face. Honestly, she probably isn’t any better, but she’d like to think she’s doing a more decent job at hiding it. Still, their hellos are awkward and sweet—the kind that tend to happen when you find out that someone feels all the wonderful, fluttery little things about you that you’ve been feeling about them. 

There’s a shyness about her that she can’t kick even as they shuffle further into her dorm room and settle up on her bed. She’s kind of surprised by it. And she’s kind of surprised that she can see it in him, too—wrung hands, fingers twisting in his locks toes curling in his shoes before he kicks them off, eyes daring to lock on hers for only a moment before they shift away again. The last time she saw anything like this in him was back in middle school, when he had that fleeting crush on her right before he and Alya started dating.

He’s still smiling, though, so maybe it never fully went away. It just went looking for a different name, and hasn’t found it yet. Or maybe it was never a crush in the first place. Maybe it was always this.

“What’re you thinking about over there?” Nino asks, slumping against the windowsill.

Marinette hugs her knees to her chest. “Stuff,” she says. “You.”

His brow quirks, and his face goes slightly pink, but he covers it up with a grin and rests his chin in his hand. “I’m honored. Just don’t think too much. Don’t want you to hurt your brain.”

“Why would thinking about you hurt my brain?” She says it before she can even think it, and instinct makes her want to clap her hands to her mouth. Instead, she clears her throat. “So about this… um. This thing. These feelings and stuff, I mean.”

“Oh,” Nino says with a spark in his eye and a tug at the corner of his mouth. “That.”

“Yeah. That. Just…” Finally, she lets herself look at him. “Did you always feel that way? Did you ever stop?”

“It’s… complicated.”

“Well, yeah. _This_ is complicated.”

“Yeah.” He laughs, a little weaker than she expected. “It is, but like, not _bad_ complicated. I guess—I guess the feeling never really left. But I also guess that I felt the way I did, y’know, back in grade school, ‘cause I figured that… that was the only way a guy could feel about a girl that wasn’t just friendship. Besides family, I mean.”

“I know what you mean.” Marinette swallows hard, laces her fingers tight around her legs to push down the lurch in her stomach. “Nino?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you… wanna cuddle, maybe?”

Nino softens, eyes going dark. “I wanna cuddle, definitely.”

It’s not uncomfortable or unusual, the way they fall into each other, but somehow her mind still feels split. Half of her is reminded of this time when they were in kindergarten and she was cooped up at his house because of a thunderstorm, back when she was still scared of them. He kept her safe then, tripped over himself down the hallway because he was carrying so many blankets and pillows, and a stuffed turtle or two on top of that. He told her, with the blankets around their heads, that this was their safe nest. that she didn’t have to feel so sad and scared and lonely, but it was okay if she did. 

(It was funny how, as soon as he said it was okay, all those feelings disappeared. Almost as funny as how those turtles ended up meaning something else, too.)

The other half of her is acutely aware of how solid he feels against her, with his arms around her and her head tucked under his chin. Safe, just like before, but the kind that tells her that she can curl up in him instead. That he can be a set of walls for her, or a rock, or a house, or anything she needs.

“You okay?” he asks, proving her thoughts as he strokes her hair.

Marinette sighs, tingles running down her spine from the sensation, and snuggles closer. She cringes on the inside, just a little, but Nino doesn’t seem to mind. “I could be better.”

“Adrien still?”

“Yeah,” she mumbles. “I’m sorry. I know it’s probably awkward for you.”

“Nah.” A pause. “Well. Maybe a little awkward. But I’m glad you can be honest with me about it, at least.”

“Well, what’s more awkward?” Marinette asks, sitting up. “The fact that you’re still friends with his ex? Or the fact that you’re _cuddling_ his ex?”

“Hey.” Nino frowns, even with his arm still slung around her waist. It makes her squirm, but in a weirdly pleasant way. “I used to cuddle with you—’cause you’re _you_, not _Adrien’s ex_—way before the two of you broke up. Listen…” His hand reaches for hers now, fingers lacing loosely. This isn’t unusual, either, but there’s still that surge of butterflies in her stomach, not quite the same but still coming into their own validity. “If you’re afraid of me feeling like a rebound, don’t be. I can’t be one if you’ve never felt like this with anyone else before, right?”

Nino has a point. “There’s still the Luka thing,” she points out, giving his hand a squeeze. Whether it’s for his reassurance or hers, she’s not too sure.

“Yeah, but the Luka thing is different, isn’t it? That _is_ romantic. This… isn’t, really, it’s just… us. Who we are with each other. It’s like an emotion thing.”

“Romance is also an emotion thing, though.”

“I know, I know, it’s just… we’re just…”

“Different,” Marinette murmurs, and Nino resigns himself to a nod.

After a while of her sitting and watching him watch her out of the corner of her eye, Nino speaks again, squeezes her hand, too. “Hey. Just so you know, if—if you ever _do_ decide you wanna try dating Luka, I’d be cool with it. I just want you to be happy, y’know? I want that for you as a friend. Now I want it for you as my. Uh.” He squints. “What _am_ I s’posed to call you?”

Marinette smiles, more warmly than she expected to, and shifts closer. “How about your happiness?”

“How about my ‘Nette?”

“I’ve always been your ‘Nette.”

“Yeah. You have.” Nino smiles back, taps her nose until she’s lying down next to him again. “C’mere. Come be not-okay with me until you’re feeling okay-okay again.”

He’s right. They love each other. And the other stuff doesn’t have to matter just yet. It’ll fall into place, just like them.

“So,” Nino goes on, fingers twirling in her hair. “Does this mean I take you out on like, dates and stuff now?”

Marinette finds the gesture comfortable. Finds all of him comfortable. Nestles closer so her ear is right on his chest. She thinks, now, that she could get used to being not-okay sometimes. “I mean… do you want to take me on dates? And stuff?”

“Well, I just—I dunno if I’d call them _dates_. Is that what they’d be?”

“They don’t have to be. We can call them something else.” She shrugs. “We’re not exactly going conventional here. I mean. Technically, this could be a date. If we wanted it to be.”

“I’m cool with that.” Underneath her, Nino’s chest rumbles with a laugh, and then his heart starts to pick up. “Can I ask one more question?”

“You just did.”

“_Another_ one, ‘Nette.”

She laughs. It’s soft, but it’s _there_, and that’s what matters. “Go ahead, go ahead.”

There’s a pause. Then Nino says, “Is kissing off the table?”

At first, Marinette thinks she heard him wrong. A nervous giggle erupts behind her teeth, but she stifles it quickly, chewing on the inside of her cheek, so that Nino doesn’t think she’s laughing at him. “You already do that. That’s literally why we’re in this position in the first place.”

“No I mean—” It almost sounds like Nino’s choking on his words just to get them out. Slowly, he moves with a rustle of sheets until they’re facing one another, until he’s got one set of shaky fingers tracing spidery patterns up and down her back and a thumb tracing the outline of her lips. Like a very small but very present part of him has been thinking about this for way too long. “I mean. Here.”

Somewhere along the line, Marinette’s heart has started to match his. She’s sure it’s her own she can hear pounding between her ears, but for a moment she thinks she was mistaken. She holds her breath for three, four, five seconds, eyes fluttering with the want to say no, absolutely not, it’s so on the table that it’s practically embedded it. It’s just that in those three, four, five seconds, her heart starts to twist, and her brow pinches together, and she bites her lip hard against the memory of the last person who kissed her, and the fantasy she’s been trying to beat away.

Nino seems to get her—which is just how they got here—and draws his thumb toward her cheek instead. Reaches up to oh-so-softly press his lips to her hairline. “Okay,” he murmurs. “We’re still figuring this stuff out. Okay. No kisses.”

“No,” Marinette spits out. Her hands are full of hesitation, writhing with nerves, but she manages to slide one of them against his, fits her fingers in his spaces and squeezes hard and looks him deep in the eye. “Not yet. Say not yet.”

“Okay,” Nino says. “Not yet.”

With Nino, she still has a few hundred in the eyes to exchange.


	5. after.

Figuring out what to call this thing feels like naming a baby. They can’t agree on anything right away—can’t call it a _thing_ because it deserves more dignity than that, can’t call it an _affair_ because, like one of Nino’s video games says, nothing about that is true and everything is permitted. But thinking about it at all puts butterflies in both their stomachs, little notes that this is theirs to have, to call their own. Reminds them that they can’t wait to figure it out, and that, maybe, it’ll figure out how to name itself.

That’s what Luka muses, anyway, the day on the Seine that she tells him everything. The run-in with Adrien, the breakdown, the slip-up that was never really a slip-up. The phone call, the holding, the kiss that never was. It’s been weeks since then, and by the end of it she’s guilty and scared and half-expecting him to hurt, to take back all those beautiful, patient things he said before because these lines are so blurred and she’s not sure what either of them has crossed. 

Instead, he squeezes her shoulder, his spinner ring digging faithfully into her skin, and says, “C’mon. I’ll treat you to your favorite.”

To which she squints, shaking, and says, “Why?”

To which Luka glances toward her heart, and then back down at his own, and then says, “I think you know.”

For a flicker of the moment that follows, Marinette wishes she could hear hearts too. Just to see if his was matching.

The café makes her less jittery these days, even though nothing about the place has changed. It’s the same wooden floorboards, made to look aged for the aesthetic. The same old lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling. The same scent of different roasts, and the smooth music, and the tray of dishes by the water dispenser. And the same old Nino, drumming his fingers on the bar and swaying from his locs to the cuffs of his jeans. Maybe she can’t see them from the register, but she knows. She knows all of him is dancing.

He looks up from the bar, and Marinette doesn’t know whose eyes he meets first—only that when he gets to her, he’s sparkling under all that grit of a several-hour workday. He gets started on her cup almost as soon as Luka states the order—small white mocha, one pump of raspberry—and Marinette decides, then more than ever, that love finds the cracks in these little things and fits itself right in. That Luka’s thinking was right.

“Well,” Luka says just under the whine of the steam wand as a cup of something iced slides his way. “Guess that’s my cue.”

“For what?” Marinette asks.

He smiles. It almost looks like he’s sharing some kind of knowing look over the counter. “To let you fill your hole,” he says, wrapping her up in one last hug, and waves with his phone in his hand.

Within seconds, her cup comes sliding too. “For you,” Nino says, and as professional as he looks, he’s still got this dopey grin on his face, lips all squiggly like he’s just walked out of a cartoon.

Honestly, Marinette’s probably no better. She takes the cup in both hands, and she settles by her window seat, and she doesn’t bother to take out her sketchbook. All there is to do is watch. Right down to the musical notes Nino scribbled on the sleeve of her cup, and the note he wrote next to them: _See you in ten._ There’s even a diamond next to it, which he’s decided is an adequate substitute for a heart, and a scribble of Arabic. Marinette can’t read what it says, but she knows that whatever it is, it’s too intimate for anyone else to know.

And then there’s the text from Luka when her phone buzzes in her hand.

(_Just the way we left it, Ma-Ma-Marinette._)

And then, even, the leisurely pace of Adrien and Kagami as they stop just outside the shop front.

Sure, it twists Marinette’s heart a little, a sharp pang to weigh down the warmth. It’s impossible not to feel anything like that. But she flicks her gaze away at just the right moment, shifts in her chair as the door swings open and chimes, and she drinks deep until the sharpness is gone. It’s more of a bandaid than a cure-all, but it gets the job done. At least until the cure-all, or one of them, sits down next to her with a cup of mint tea with too much sugar.

And these ten minutes are all but dragging.

She doesn’t have to look out of the corner of her eye to know that Adrien’s gaze falls on her, must linger for a moment or two. She doesn’t want to turn to see the subtleties in it, to know whether he’s giving her the eyes of an old friend or a burnt-out flame. As far as she knows, the last look he ever had of her before now was that dignified, squared-shoulder stride away from him. So that’s what she has to maintain. The _over it_. The growth. His eyes are still burning holes into her, or at least it feels like it, as she sinks into the armchair and the music overhead, pulls out her sketchbook and starts on those broad strokes again. Notes and beats and flowers and the flutter of chiffon.

She’s Marinette, after all. She’s a busy young woman, with classes to pass and coffee to drink and holes to fill with herself. And several minutes to wait out.

Those several minutes end up feeling like seconds and hours all at once, but she feels Nino’s arrival more than she actually sees it. The change in the music, the beep of the timer he wears on his apron, the warmth of his cup as he places it beside hers to signal the end of his day.

“Mind if I join you?” he asks, and she turns to him because she wants to. He’s smiling wide, and in the moment—maybe because of him, because he’s just that good—Marinette almost forgets or doesn’t care whether Adrien knows how Kagami takes her coffee. Her face warms up, and she nods in a way that feels affectionate and mechanical, and when he sits in the chair next to her the armrests bump the way she wishes their hands would.

He probably wishes it, too. Maybe just as badly as she does.

“I talked to Adrien,” he says, tapping the lid of his drink, voice dropping low even though it doesn’t need to with all this chatter. “About the, uh, the ‘us’ thing. Just felt… weird, not saying anything.” 

Marinette hates that she still manages to go stiff after all this time, but the fact that it doesn’t affect her so badly or so immediately is progress all the same. “How’d he take it?”

Nino shrugs. “Same way he takes everything else.”

In stride, with hints of emotion and the vague sense that he’s lost something that it wouldn’t hurt him not to retrieve. Somehow, that speaks volumes and silence at the same time. “I talked to Alya, too. And Luka. For the same reason.”

“Yeah? What’d he say?”

Marinette thinks back to the text message, pats her stomach to disperse the butterflies and doesn’t bother fighting the tug at the corner of her mouth. “Just what you’d expect him to say.”

Minutes later, when their cups are drained and she’s still holding onto the sleeve and all its doodles, Nino breaks the quiet between them again. “You know, it’s kind of bad form to get all lovey-dovey in your work place. Even after you clock out.”

She chews lightly on the end of her pencil. It’s not exactly a bad habit, but just something to do. Her sketch isn’t quite done—they hardly ever are these days, because there’s so much to get down and so little time to organize it all—but she’ll come back to it later. She’s gotten better at that. “You have any better ideas?”

Nino glances back toward the register; Marinette doesn’t bother to follow. “I can think of one or two.”

“You’ve been doing a lot of thinking, huh?”

“Yeah,” he says. “But it’s worth it. I’ve been holding onto some stuff for a while. Plenty on reserve, and I know just the lady it’s for.” He gets to his feet, tosses their cups, reaches for her shoulder to remind her he’s still here. “You ready to go, ‘Nette?”

His thumb finds a home in the crook of her neck, in the hollow just behind her collarbone. Even though it tickles a little at first, her heart still swells and pops and fills her with flutters from head to toe. He doesn’t even have to kiss her to do that.

(He still hasn’t yet, but he doesn’t have to, either. The touches are enough. The holding is enough. They’ll come back to that later, too.)

Nino doesn’t wait to slip his fingers between hers once she’s packed up and ready to leave the café behind, but it isn’t until they’re outside, with what feels like the rest of the world behind him, that he presses his lips to the back of her hand. “Let’s go,” he says, pulling her into him with the scent of coffee still on his skin and his usual warmth in every touch. “Let’s go home.”

Marinette doesn’t need to peek through the front glass. Happiness doesn’t break when it turns the corner.

**Author's Note:**

> I have a Twitter and a Tumblr; follow me there for more shenanigans! Feel free to leave comments and questions and stuff in my Curious Cat as well c: and kudos here, too!
> 
> Thank you so much for reading!!! I hope you're having a lovely day <3


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